Ghost Recon: Wildlands - 10 Things We Learned From The Beta
7. Vehicle Controls Feel A Tad Too Arcade-y
Ubisoft
For the first time in the series' history, vehicles are now totally controllable. The era of on-rail chopper rides is well and truly dusted.
To me, this was always going to be my most anticipated element of Wildlands. Vehicles should, ostensibly, enhance the tactical options left at the players fingertips. Upon its announcement, I imagined Black Hawk Down-esque sequences of ambushing convoys with my partners, surgically removing tires and using armoured vehicles to ambush high-value targets on the roads of Bolivia.
A tad ambitious, maybe, but there's little doubt that all of this will be achievable when Wildlands drops next month. There is, however, a key issue in how these vehicles control. Bikes, cars and armed-buggies bounce and clip into the dirt, sliding everywhere and simultaneously severing any connection there was between your vehicle and the dirt that lies beneath. Not only does this make crashing all the more frequent and indeed frustrating, it just looks poor. If Ubi can fix that before March, then vehicle gameplay could end up being Wildlands' best element.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
